A Reflection on Spiritual Guidance – Needing to be Loved

Published August 31, 2011 | By storyteller

Everyone I meet I say to them

“Love me! “

but I don’t say this out loud

because someone might call the cops.

There was a time in my life when I lived those lines.

I sometimes wonder why I spend my time writing and reflecting on spiritual guidance. This is especially so in relation to guidance using what might be clearly identified as terminology based on the Christian tradition. There are a number of reasons for this. While I am not a fan of the Christian church and its associated hierarchies of power I am a lover of the teachings of Christ and the invitation to what the modern mystic Andrew Harvey calls the way of Christing. Christing is a journey in consciousness raising through many stages including the stages of temptation, surrender and death. This is not necessarily the experience of the death of the body but is the experience of the death of the sense of the separate self which then leads into the realisation of the true Self – the Christ.

In my own spiritual journey I have been graced certain revelations. I have been graced glimpses of what is beyond the sense of the separate self. In Zen this is called Satori. It is not full enlightenment but is a glimpse of the potential that is experienced within the enlightened state. It is the perfume from these experiences that I offer you in the writings that populate this blog and its related website. Any of this writing that inspires comes from this knowing and the reflection of that knowing state. Any uninspired aspect of this writing is me getting in the way of such inspiration.

Another reason why I write reflections on spiritual guidance using the language of the Way of Love is because I find that there is so little inspired instruction available within organised religion. I have met with many who are priests, who are clergy and who are monks. I have met with gurus and those who claim to have the secret to the meaning of life. Not one of them had any knowing of what they professed to know. The only people I have met who were the knowing of the Divine in form where those who were living outside organised religion. The priests, the clergy seemed to know about the Divine but had no personal experience of direct revelation of the Christ in their own lives. However, this is not to say that there are not people within the Christian tradition who have experienced this. One person who inspires this writer and storyteller is Thomas Merton. Another is Bebe Griffiths. There is St. John of the Cross. There is St. Teresa of Avila. One of my favourite revelatory men is St. Francis of Assisi and there is of course one of the greatest Christian teachers of all time as revealed in the writings of Meister Eckhart. And of course there are the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth.

There is another reason why I write this blog inviting spiritual revelation of the wild and precious life. This is because in this world of time and space there is a deep spiritual hunger for what has been referred to in one of my favourite hymns as the bread of Heaven. This is not some kind of special loaf that is made somewhere in a place beyond the confines of the earth. This is the wish to be fed, to be nourished directly from the Source of Creation – whatever name you care to give it – because it is beyond all names. This nourishment is not confined to the reading of words. It goes beyond words and nourishes you in ways that are far beyond the grasp of language.

I also write and reflect on spiritual guidance in order to heal the wounding from my religious upbringing in my native country of Northern Ireland. I am what I sometimes refer to as a Christian in recovery. I am in recovery from scripture and from stricture. The way in which I was personally wounded is still going on in that country. I returned to Ireland for a number of reasons. One of these was to try and offer some sort of alternative to the sin and damnation program that was, and still is, on offer in many of our religious institutions. The best evidence of the teachings of Christ are the ability to radiate compassion and Love from the silent interior knowing of who you are. This you will not access through words alone although words can point the way.

I would be a rich man ( although I am a rich man) if I had been given a dollar every time I was told I should believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as my one and only Saviour. I wanted to believe. I needed to believe because I so wanted to belong. The problem was this. When I said, “Yes,” to this invitation nothing changed. I was still as lonely and forlorn as before and maybe even more forlorn. It seemed to change others but not me. When I asked if I was doing something wrong I was told again and again that all I had to do was ask the Lord Jesus into my heart and I would be saved.

Well I tried that. I tried it many times. I said the words silently inside. I said the words aloud. Still there was no sense of something different happening except that the process made me feel more lonely. I thought that I did not belong. Even at this very young age, however, there was a part of me that knew that those who claimed this was the Way, the Truth and the Life, were only mouthing a script. The words that they spoke were words from the Bible but they themselves had never been directly nourished by experience called the bread of heaven. That inner knower within me that was there, even at a young age, has been a blessing and a curse. It has been a blessing because it took me into the real. It was once a curse in the sense that I could never really belong to any group and I was always left to move on.

My spiritual community is composed of those who have taken the hero’s journey. These are the mystics of all traditions and none. You meet them amidst the pages of this blog and its related website. I hope that they invite your awareness of the grace note you are here to play as the reed of Love. My spiritual journey really began out of a sense of wanting to belong and needing to be loved. Only there was no way in which I was going to accept anything but the real thing. Mouthing words of a creed and simply saying that you accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart, or that you believe in God, isn’t revelation and doesn’t lead to revelation. It isn’t knowing. You might belong to a group of believers but that doesn’t mean you have had the experience of being born again into the knowing of who and why you are.

Revelation is the direct experience of Oneness that leaves you certain. It leaves you knowing that for certain you are not simply a body living in this time and space dimension. It is the revelation that you are the birthless/deathless One and, paradoxically speaking, you are the play of eternity in form. Revelation is the knowing, rather than the cerebral belief in what is called eternal life. You don’t get eternal life as a gift. You are eternal life. Eternal does not mean that you live for an immeasurable time in the body or beyond the body. Eternal life is the direct experience of living beyond time. You can attend any number of bible study classes or classes studying the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran. If all that you do is repeat and learn the words by rote this does not mean anything other than you know the words of your scripture. It does not mean you are the knowing of the experience that such scripture was written to invite you to live and to be.

As the modern mystic Eckhart Tolle advises. “Religious scripture, whatever scripture it is, is a signpost.” It is an invitation to take the journey within. It is the invitation to redemption. Redemption means simply that you turn your attention within and that you develop faith, not in a creed, but in a living creative process that knows how to live and love through you. This is the journey that the Buddha called The Middle Way. It is the journey beyond opposites that is invited by the instruction

Judge not that ye be not judged.

It is the journey beyond opposites into the heart centre (5th chakra) where one becomes the knowing of the peace that passeth understanding. Mouthing scripture is simply clinging to the signpost. At least there is some comfort in doing this. You can belong to the group and you can take their authority as your own. You don’t then have to venture on your journey to individualisation. You can simply become one of the flock. This gives you some consolation and even some pride in the fact that you are a redeemed one and that yours is the one way. Yours is the Way the Truth and the Life and to hell with all the others.

However, your are unique. You are here as a unique dance of Love in form. What informs you (and it is not intellectual information) is the movement of Love. This real information arises from the well being of who you are. Trust this. It is the development of true faith which is the trust in the unknowing of your becoming. There is no script. There is only the dance. There is only the silence. There is only the stillness that speaks.

It is easier to build a hierarchy that can then tell you that it knows something called the Good News. Then you don’t have to do the work of walking the invitation of the Christ. All you have to do is say a few words and you become a member of the in crowd who profess the one way. However, the Way the Truth and the Life is not something fixed. You cannot own it. It doesn’t belong to anyone. God never creates something twice. The harder you cling to signposts along the way the less you journey. You can spend your whole life clinging to signposts. Worse still you can spend your life inviting others to cling to the same signs. You can spend your whole life living in the known and think that you know.

There are many false prophets along the way. They will tell you that they know the way because they want you to belong to their way. It is a way of authorising what they think they are. There is a kind of safety in numbers. Thus you amass a group of believers who never move beyond belief. They never get to have the experience that is beyond belief that the group consciousness is intended to express. Surely, we think, that if a mass of people follow a particular signpost that it has validity. The signpost is only validated by taking the journey that it is pointing the way toward.

In this blog I invite you, not into creed, not into clinging to signposts called scripture but into trusting that which is within you to know who and why you are and which gives meaning and purpose to your one wild and precious life. The spiritual journey is a journey of individualism. It is not a script that you repeat ad infinitum. The real scripture is not written in words. It is a living energetic of knowing that arises from within. It arises if you tend to its unfolding. You can be guided in a general way in relation to that unfolding but you are unique. You will never be in this form again. Your uniqueness is created to bless creation.

If you are intent on taking the journey into the knowing of spirit and the knowing of the inspired life then begin to cultivate faith that is built, not on the shifting sands of religious dogma, but on the rock of knowing arising from within. This is the building of trust in the power that created you from its intention of Love. It knows you by heart. Words can point the way but words are symbols of an experience that is beyond words. Words can also be used to manipulate and control as has been done by all kinds of hierarchical institutions throughout history.

This faith is not simply a creed. It is faith in the unknown. It helps tremendously to have been graced a direct revelation of knowing. However, the heart knows what the head cannot know. This is because the head thinks in opposites while the heart is the knowing of that which is whole, that which is beyond opposites and that which is holy. This is the experience of sacred unity and leads to an experience beyond belief. This gives you peace beyond understanding. So let me close with one of the greatest spiritual guidance statements ever given.

Be still and know that I AM Love.

Be still and know that I AM.

Be still and know.

Be still

Be.

Spiritual guidance comes in all sorts of ways. Trust the inner knower. Trust the guidance of the mystics from all traditions and especially the mystics who speak from the tradition that speaks to your heart. If it makes you feel guilty give it up. If it makes you feel inspired then follow it. You didn’t arrive here without the connection to your Source. So stay aligned with that.

May it be so.